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2008
2008 (MMVIII) was Gaia's Sixth year and its Fifth anniversary. With the introduction of the La Victoire and its premium items, this year was heavily focused on the updating of limited items, sponsorships, promoting, and feature updates. There were noticeably more convention tours and attempts to attract new visitors to the site, as the sites design and Gaia logo had gone from being visually colorful, to more simplified mature colors such as mocha brown. Before the changes to the homepage a site design mock-up announcement was made, and presented up to 5 different homepages that would rotate every time someone accessed the Welcome page. The most noticeable were the homepages containing real people, a strong departure from the hand drawn images of made up characters. Besides the focus on trying to get new members, this year also had many updates that focused on the Gaia Community, thus the Gaia Daily (eventually called Community Spotlight) was created, these announcements were to bring focus to various the actives of Gaians around the site; such as guilds, shops and project threads. There were also contests, weekly polls, and Daily Chance to participate in. But the shift from a Anime / Manga / RPG inspired site was slowly transitioning to a more Social Network inspired site. More features and updates that would attract a more social network crowd were the VJ (upgraded), Gaia OMG (spanned to Facebook), Celebrity Snare, Gaia Badge (could be used as a forum signature on other sites), the Labelmaker, and the staying power of Scion cars, MTV, and Skittles. Although most Gaians didn't consider the changes and additions acceptable, these changes were necessary and an attempt to balance out the rising cost of keeping the site running and free. As the new Battle System (eventually called zOMG!) was quickly coming to add to the cost. Trivia * On February 27th, there were new mouth and eye styles (avatar creation only) released. The no mouth option was still not available for the Dress up page. To get the new eyes or a new starter hairstyle, one had to use "delete avatar" and recreate it with a new base model. Though eventually the hair was available for Salon Durem. * This year marked the largest manga updates, 12 in total. * This year also had the most Evolving Items evolve in every month. * Surprisingly there were no 3 item to one letter Monthly Collectibles for this year. * On March 25th, the release of the Infinity Hat brought great controversy, as it contained many known Meme (net trends) that Gaians disapproved of. * On April 3rd, the changes to the Marketplace was to stop Sellers from canceling bids early. Sellers could no longer remove bid set items after a certain amount of time (5 minutes), this was implemented based on feedback by Bidders/Buyers who were frustrated with Sellers pulling auction when they didn't get the bids they wanted. * On April 22nd, Ian returned to work at the Barton Boutique. His appearance had changed due to him no longer hiding his vampire origins behind hair-dye and contacts. * On July 22nd, the Jumbo Plushies, based on KiKi and Coco, were released in the GStore. There were only 25 available for purchase and they cost up to $300 dollars. Milestones for Gaia Online 2008 * February 18th is said to officially be "Gaiaonline Day" in San Francisco (see) Announcement: Join us for the Gaia 5th anniversary event! * April 22nd Gaia Online was the winner of the Webware 100 again (Social category) and had 136,000 votes. While well ahead of the 91,000 it won last year, it represented only 34% of the votes cast in the Social category, compared to 60% last year. * June 18 - News Bulletin: Time Magazine Knows We're Awesome. Gaia Online was named as one of the 50 best sites of 2008 by Time Magazine. External link * Featured Announcements: Timetravel (2008) * Community Announcements: Timetravel (2008) Featured Announcements 2008 Community Announcements 2008 Category:Years